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Seafarers

8 minutes

Poetry of perception: ‘We Grow Accustomed to the Dark’

2 minutes

Tusalava

9 minutes

How ISPs violate the laws of mathematics

6 minutes

How hairworms highjack a cricket

5 minutes

Aeon for Friends

Not quite ashore – the in-between world of a cargo-ship rest stop

Due to visa restrictions and short turnarounds, many crews of international cargo ships stay in port after docking. Their brief stints ashore are frequently spent in seafarers’ centres, where they can unwind and connect with families who are often oceans away, before climbing back aboard and shipping out. In her observational short documentary Seafarers, the UK director Eleanor Mortimer spends a shore leave with a cargo-ship crew at the Felixstowe Seafarer’ Centre – a small and sparse space, equipped with just a few amenities, including a piano, a pool table, WiFi access and a souvenir shop. Providing a small window into this largely unseen world where cargo-ship crews experience countries in strange, truncated increments, Mortimer’s film is also a subtle reflection on international trade and borders in an age of rising nationalist tides.

Aeon for Friends

Written by Emily Dickinson during the depths of the US Civil War, the untitled poem known as ‘We Grow Accustomed to the Dark’ conjures hope and perseverance amid waves of chaos and uncertainty. In this animation, the UK filmmaker and illustrator Hannah Jacobs visualises the poem in fleeting scenes that oscillate between vibrant colour and darkness, through which human figures careen. Beginning with an epigraph drawing a parallel between artistic and scientific discovery, the video was created for an online neuroscience course at Harvard University as part of a series that explores the human sensory experience through poetry and animation.

Aeon for Friends

Life emerges, evolves and fights for supremacy in this 1929 avant-garde classic

The New Zealand-born artist Leonard Charles Huia Lye (1901-80), better known as Len Lye, is renowned for his work in kinetic sculpture and experimental film, and is widely considered one of the most innovative modernists of the 20th century. Lye’s first film, Tusalava (1929), produced over two years following a move to London, was born of the city’s emerging experimental film scene and Lye’s abiding interest in Maori, Aboriginal and Samoan art. Composed of some 7,000 hand-drawn images, the abstract animation synthesises modern and ancient art as it depicts simple life forms emerging, evolving and coming into conflict. As with the influence of African art on Pablo Picasso, Lye’s use of so-called ‘primitivism’ has been both praised for introducing non-Western perspectives to Western art, and criticised for cultural appropriation. The film was originally paired with a now-lost piano score from the UK-born composer Jack Ellitt. This version features the UK composer Eugene Goossens’s composition Rhythmic Dance (1928), which Lye later suggested as an alternative accompaniment.

Aeon for Friends

If simple logic isn’t working with your internet company, try Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory

This tongue-in-cheek animation from the US YouTuber Henry Reich – the mind behind MinutePhysics – is a creative exercise in how not to lose your cool when faced with the abyss of illogic. Recalling the mundane, mindnumbing tribulations of trying to get a straight answer on billing from his internet service provider (ISP), Reich concludes that the company isn’t just guilty of subpar customer service – their policies also break nearly every fundamental law of modern mathematics. Reich’s clever excoriation of telecommunication companies was created for The Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses (BAHFest), an annual ‘celebration of well-argued and thoroughly researched but completely incorrect scientific theories’.

Aeon for Friends

Mind control and zombification do exist. Just look at these crickets

Warning: this video is not for the squeamish.

Mayflies make a quick and nutritious snack for crickets. But, rather unfortunately for the cricket population of California, some mayflies are home to hairworms (nematomorphs) – parasitic creatures that will stop at nothing to make their way back to water. Once consumed, hairworms feed off crickets from the inside, absorbing all of their lipids, and eventually putting the cricket in a state of developmental and reproductive limbo. Worse still, once these fast-growing parasites reach their adult length of one to two feet, they zombify their hosts, unleashing brain chemicals that make the infected crickets wander aimlessly until they hit water, where the worms make their final escape and start the whole cycle anew. By studying this process, scientists hope to learn more about how brain parasites might affect human behaviour. The ordeal is captured in microscopic detail in this episode of the often creepy, always fascinating science documentary series Deep Look. Read more about the video at KQED Science.

Aeon for Friends

Not quite ashore – the in-between world of a cargo-ship rest stop

Due to visa restrictions and short turnarounds, many crews of international cargo ships stay in port after docking. Their brief stints ashore are frequently spent in seafarers’ centres, where they can unwind and connect with families who are often oceans away, before climbing back aboard and shipping out. In her observational short documentary Seafarers, the UK director Eleanor Mortimer spends a shore leave with a cargo-ship crew at the Felixstowe Seafarer’ Centre – a small and sparse space, equipped with just a few amenities, including a piano, a pool table, WiFi access and a souvenir shop. Providing a small window into this largely unseen world where cargo-ship crews experience countries in strange, truncated increments, Mortimer’s film is also a subtle reflection on international trade and borders in an age of rising nationalist tides.